Chapter 34

In a Nutshell

HowardGardner

Allow me to transport all of us to the Paris of 1900—La Belle Epoque—when
the city fathers of Paris approached a psychologist named Alfred Binet with an
unusual request: Could he devise some kind of a measure that would predict
which youngsters would succeed and which would fail in the primary grades
of Paris schools? As everybody knows, Binet succeeded. In short order, his
discovery came to be called the ‘‘intelligence test’’; his measure, the ‘‘IQ.’’ Like
other Parisian fashions, the IQ soon made its way to the United States, where it
enjoyed a modest success until World War I. Then, it was used to test over one
million American recruits, and it had truly arrived. From that day on, the IQ
test has looked like psychology’s biggest success—a genuinely useful scientific
tool.
What is the vision that led to the excitement about IQ? At least in the West,
people had always relied on intuitive assessments of how smart other people
were. Now intelligence seemed to be quantifiable. You could measure some-
one’s actual or potential height, and now, it seemed, you could also measure
someone’s actual or potential intelligence. We had one dimension of mental
ability along which we could array everyone.
The search for the perfect measure of intelligence has proceeded apace. Here,
for example, are some quotations from an ad for a widely used test:

Need an individual test which quickly provides a stable and reliable esti-

mate of intelligence in four or five minutes per form? Has three forms?

Does not depend on verbal production or subjective scoring? Can be used

with the severely physically handicapped (even paralyzed) if they can

signal yes or no? Handles two-year-olds and superior adults with the

same short series of items and the same format? Only $16.00 complete.

Now, that’s quite a claim. The American psychologist Arthur Jensen suggests
that we could look at reaction time to assess intelligence: a set of lights go on;
how quickly can the subject react? The British psychologist Hans Eysenck sug-
gests that investigators of intelligence should look directly at brain waves.
There are also, of course, more sophisticated versions of the IQ test. One of
them is called the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). It purports to be a similar
kind of measure, and if you add up a person’s verbal and math scores, as
is often done, you can rate him or her along a single intellectual dimension.

From chapter 1 inFramesofMind:TheTheoryofMultipleIntelligences(New York: Basic Books, 1993),
5–12. Reprinted with permission.